I wonder more people using headphones is also a result of the move from dedicated offices to cubicle farms. A lot of the offices I've worked in were so noisy and distracting, I've often used headphones not because I felt like listening to music, but to drown out the noise.

I've seriously considered getting a pair of ear protection headphones like an airport worker and just using those. Or noise cancellation headphones.

But I've always wondered how we know that the speed of light is the same regardless, that the gravitational constant is constant throughout space and time.

There are actually some scientisst that have proposed a Variable Speed of Light theory. In their theory, the speed of light decreases over time. In other words it was much faster in the early universe. The cool thing about it is, once you make that assumption a lot of other things are suddenly explainable (for example, you don't need inflation in the early universe anymore).

João Magueijo has written a book about it called "Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation". There is also a BBC documentary about it called "Einsteins Biggest Blunder".

IPv6 will give almost everybody practically static addresses, the ultimate undeleteable cookie. So the EU regulation will be futile very soon.

That problem has been solved by RFC 4941, otherwise known as the Privacy Extensions. Most OSes support it, though I believe some don't enable it by default. IIRC the iPhone is one of the devices that doesn't support it, but that should be fixable once IPv6 becomes more widespread.

So the job of the 800 break horse power internal combustion engine is to deliver fuel into the rocket engine (not the jet engine). But the rocket is a solid fuel booster (essentially a glorified fireworks motor). Err wait, what? What do you need a fuel pump for a solid fuel rocket booster?

It's not a pure solid fuel rocket. It contains solid fuel, but then they pump hydrogen peroxide thru the rocket as an oxidizer. That's being pumped by the F1 engine. Seeing how it has to pump one ton of HTP in 22 seconds, you can see why they need that much power for the pump. More details on the rocket engine.

Let's also not forget the tragedy of Babylon 5. They said they were canceling at season 4, so the creators had to rush the show's plot, then they decided afterward to renew a 5th season, so they had to make up new crap completely outside the realm of the original planned plot line.

Babylon 5 ran on PTEN for four seasons. When they didn't renew it for season 5, it moved to TNT for the final season. One canceled it, and another picked it up. Not only did the networks not do what you described, SciFi had nothing to do with it.

The Arduino won? I didn't even know there was a contest!
There are lots of microcontrollers and boards out there: Basic Stamps, PICs, 68HC11s, Parallax Propellors. You can get some for as little as $3 each. There's probably more stuff out there for Basic Stamps than for the Arduino. There's definitely more PIC related stuff.

Basic stamps and PICs used to get a lot of usage in hobbyist projects, but that has changed in the last couple of years. First it started shifting from PIC to Atmel, and then to the (Atmel based) Arduino. It's been a while since I've seen a new project that someone had chosen PIC for.

IMHO the move to Atmle may have been partially due to the PICs super annoying architecture (bank switching for every other operation, for starters). The Arduino of course has a big advantage for people who don't want (or can't) design their own PCBs.

If look at Projects on Make, or elsewhere online, you'll see Arduino being used in the majority of the newer projects.

An alternative theory is that the speed of light used to be much higher in the early universe (like 60x higher). This is known as the variable speed of light (VSL) concept. There is a documentary from 2000 called "Einstein's Biggest Blunder", that gives a good overview of how it was developed.

If the universe started with a big bang, with all matter originated in an extremely compact volume, and if it's radius can't expand faster than light, then there should be no points in the universe beyond what we can see (as limited by light speed.) What am I missing?

The current theory that tries to explain this is called Inflation. Basically, it assumes that after the Big Bang there was a period of Inflation where space time itself expanded faster than the speed of light.

I don't know what Intel is putting into those chips, but I am highly doubtful it is the way the article states it.

Chip real estate is expensive. So Intel is going to put a complete 3G module on the CPU and use it only for this feature? And to top it off, it has some kinda of separate battery, cause you know, it works when the chip is off? Nonsense.

This is probably some feature that gets build into the AMT support of some chipsets, maybe on Laptops that have a 3G connection already.But the way they are describing this? I call BS on that.

It boggles my mind that 25 years later most cars I can buy in the US get half of what my 25 year old car got. If that. It also means that getting 70 shouldn't be impossible. Thats 3.3l/100km, and it's been done.